American VisualCultures

Edited by David Holloway and John Beck

CONTINUUMThe Tower Building11 York RoadLondon SEl 7NX

15 Easr 26rh StreetNew YorkNY 10010

© David Holloway, John Beck and contributors 2005

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 0-8264-6484-X (hardback)0-8264-6485-8 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataAmerican visual cultures I edited by David Holloway and John Beck.

p. em.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8264-6484-X - ISBN 0-8264-6485-8 (pbk)

1. Arts and society - United States. 2. Arts, American - 19th century.3. Arts, American - 20th century. I. Holloway, David, 1967-U. Beck,John, 1963-

NXI80.s6A437 2005700' .973--<lc22

2004061827

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, ManchesterPrinted and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Cold War 'Containment Culture'and PhotographyRobert Frank's The Americans and the 1950s

NEIL CAMPBELL

Robert Frank's The Americans collected images from a road trip across the USA whose aim was'the observation and record of what one naturalized American finds to see in the United Statesthat signifies the kind of civilization born here and spreading elsewhere' (Frank in Tucker andBrookman 1986: 29). Its grainy, unconventional, photographs of America's complex anddivided social landscape made it a controversial collection that struggled to find a publisher inthe climate of Cold War suspicions of any perceived anti-American visions. It was, therefore,published initially by Delpire in France in 1958, and only found a US publisher with the altern­ative Grove Press the following year. As Frank's words show, his road trip had a specificmetbodological approach that brought him close to his subjects and their landscapes as he bothobserved and recorded their diverse lives. In this respect his mode of investigation as a photo­grapher has much in common with ethnography, believing as it does in participant observationas its key method, while remaining simultaneously aware of the tensions between being eithertoo much 'inside' or indeed 'oUlside' the objects of enquiry. Frank's relationship to the USA, asa newcomer from Switzerland, positioned him on this very borderline between the inside andthe outside, contributing to his unusual, dialogical approach, torn between 'hope and sadness'(see Campbell 2003).

Frank 'was marked by Parisian Surrealism', by its 'disdain for descriptions untransformedby psychic energies', its fascination for the 'unconscious meanings and emotions triggered bythe encounter with certain external objects including the degraded and unremarked thing'(Osborne 2000: 129). As James Clifford argues, 'surrealism in an expanded sense ... valuesfragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions', its diverse forms constituting amulti-layered response to 'a reality deeply in question' after World War 1 (Clifford 1988: 118,120). Surrealist photography, for example, favoured techniques that 'doubled, multiplied, frag­mented or mounted a physical assault on the representational image', questioning the premisesand assumptions of photo-realism (Osborne 2000: 165). Ethnography - literally 'culture­writing' - 'decodes and recodes, telling the grounds of collective order and diversity, inclusionand exclusion ... writing about, against and among cultures' (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 2-3).Dealing in 'partial truths' ethnography works in the 'field' seeing cultures as complex and 'rela­tionaI', full of 'voices' clamouring for expression, but resisting in its more 'dialogical modes'the urge to synthesize or restrain certain voices at the expense of others. In this style of infor­mation gathering the ethnographer questions 'monophonic authority', preferring heteroglossic,collage-like patterns (ibid.: 15) that form an 'assemblage containing voices, other than theethnographer's' (Clifford 1988: 147). Thus Clifford sees a productive link between surrealismand ethnography, describing an 'ethnographic surrealist practice' that 'attacks the familiar, pro·voking the irruption of otherness - the unexpected . .. a play of simila.riry and difference, thefamiliar and the strange, the here and the elsewhere' (ibid.: 145-6).

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Robert Frank's photography echoes these ideas, based as it is upon encounter and dialogue,juxtaposirional and jarring in form, and always engaged with lthe invention and interruptionof meaningful wholes in the work of cultural import-export' (ibid.: 147). Leaving Switzerlandin 1946 for Paris, Frank travelled on to the USA and Peru where he discovered 'the beginningof a whole new way of photographing' that evoked a sense of his own silent displacementamongst alien cultures marking his work forever, most obviously in The Americans, where heapproached the USA from outside, capturing its cultural landscapes with all the critical capa­bility of the ethnographic surrealist confronting a strangely familiar and yet disturbingly contra­dictory world (in Westerbeck and Meyetowitz 2001: 352).

Arriving in New York in 1947 Frank uncovered, as the Beats would simultaneously, a cultureedging towards a totalitarianism rooted in consumerism, consensus politics and paranoia,where the Truman Doctrine divided the world into the 'free' and 'unfree', promising 'a way oflife free from coercion' where America would stand against 'terror and oppression', and 'fix','control' and 'suppress' recalcitrant peoples (Griffith 1992: 112-13). Containment abroad wasincreasingly replicated at home, with policies limiting perceived threats to American 'freedoms'and domestic order epitomized by the trials of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, and the actionsof the House Un-American Activities Committee. As the 'ethnographic surrealist', Frankexposed this consensual America as a hegemony under which the 'interests and tendencies' ofparticular groups created a 'compromise equilibrium' where values, objectives and culturalmeanings incorporated Americans into dominant structures of power, believing that the prom­ised good life could be theirs (ibid.: 161). Resisting normalized, idyllic advertising images andmythic political propaganda, Frank instead became increasingly aware of America's 'fracturedframes of reference, its inllnite regression of half-lives, its proliferation of contaminated sites,its bounty of waste' ( ade11995: xii).

Such domestic containment formed around the assumption that America had achieved eco­nomic abundance, Galbraith's 'affluent society' (1958), providing the driving force for a JUStcultural and political order with a core of agreed beliefs and values that signalled what DanielBell termed 'the end of ideology', since a nation liberated from economic scarcity was in turnliberated from social conflict (see Bell 1960). The power of such 'large cultural narratives' was'to unify, codify, and contain - perhaps intimidate is the best word - the personal narratives ofits population', emphasizing the need for approval and validation by others in what DavidRiesman, in another key text of the times, The Lonely Crowd, called 'other-directedness' (Nadel1995: 4). For Riesman, 'other-direcredness' meant a person's 'adjustment' to 'the character heis supposed to have, and the inner experiences and outer appurtenances that are supposed togo with it', ensuring they 'fit the culture as though they were made for it'; a notion emphasizedpoignantly with the rise of suburbia as a standardized, uniform existence in America's cultureof abundance (Riesman 1965: 24Q-42).

These elements of the 1950s' consensus were, of course, contrary to Bell's claim, preciselyideological, validating institutionalized core values of the white family, consumption, contain­ment and capitalism as the right-minded solution to conflict and injustice. Shocking differencesstill remained below the su.rface in a postwar world of segregation and poverty, exposed inMichael Harrington's The Other America as an invisible nation hidden by the veil of 'a famil­iar America . .. celebrated in speeches and advertised on television and in magazines . .. [ashaving] the highest mass standard of living the world has ever known' (Harrington 1963: 9).The investigative writer has much in common with Frank's photography, traveUing 'off thebeaten track' away from the 'tourist' routes, making 'an invisible land' visible through confront­ing 'well-meaning ignorance' and 'social blindness', and representing the 'atomized' with 'noface ... no voice' - 'to tell a little of the "thickness" of personal life in the Other America' (ibid.:10-12, 24). The idea of 'thickness' draws on Gilbert Ryle's ethnographic concept of 'thickdescription', later made famous by Clifford Geertz as 'piled-up structures of inference andimplication . .. knotted into one another . .. at once strang~ irregular, and inexplicit' (Geertz1993: 7, 10). Frank's photographs echo this ethnographic 'thick description', recordingcomplex 'texts', 'foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations . .. in

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transient examples of shaped behaviour' (ibid.: 10). Hence in The Americans 'Trolley - NewOrleans' conveys a divided nation of gender, race and class hierarchies where people sit silentlysuspended, framed within the photograph sraring outward. Both Frank and Harringron sharedan urgent need to record, for, as the latter put it, 'The problem . .. is to a large extent one ofvision . . .' since if 'They cannot see. They cannot act' (ibid.: 156, 155). Frank's acts of seeingconstantly draw the viewer into multiple layers of vision, as in 'Trolley', breaking up conven­rional frames, challenging rhe audience ro see the world differently and to ask questions of the'normal' perspeerives provided in the dominant mythologies of the 1950s.

The overly-planned 'Orgworld' of the 1950s (Rosenberg 1961: 284), with its bureaucratic,managetial 'white collar'-class conttolling its new economy and denying the possibility of theunpredictable, reminded Frank too much of his parents' Switzerland. In contrast, Frank's sryleeschews control, deliberately breaking the visual conventions of hegemonic America epitom­ized by Time and Life magazines and 'The Family of Man' exhibition with their orderly, cnn­rained narratives. Instead, Frank's surreal angles and mobile reframings, learned in part fromfilm nair watched in Europe and New York during the late 1940s, intervene to recast order andcontainment in an unstable field challenging systems of authority, convention and control, withthe inclusion of 'moral ambivalence . .. criminality . .. complex contradictions in motives andevents . .. conspir[ing] to make the viewer co-experience the anguish and insecurity . .. [,] thatstate of tension instilled in the spectator[,] when the psychological reference points are removed'(Borde and Chaumeton 1996: 25). Certainly, reading The Americans as a sequence recalls filmnair's corrupt officials, duplicitous politicians, femme fatales and its constant questions andshifting sensations created through uncanny compositions and lighting (see Sass 1998). Theimages plunge the viewer into an ambiguous, partial construction of filmic fragments, swirlinginvitations to narrative that tease and provoke the eye and the mind, generating complex socialquestions and doubts.

Frank's friends, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, also srruggled in responding ro this'Orgworld', becoming a mixture of what Riesman called the 'anomie' and the 'autonomous',that is, eithet unable to conform or be 'adjusted', or choosing not to be (Riesman 1965: 242-3).Ginsberg, as so many of the Beats, sought to revitalize America to reclaim an olderWhitmanesque vision of democratic freedom and possibility, a vision that had, they believed,been lost in the 'tight web' of postwar conformity (ibid.: 243). 'America will be discovered',Ginsberg wrote on Independence Day 1959, in a comment that could easily apply to the photo­graphs Frank had taken across the nation and published in the USA that same year. MichaelMcClure's essay on the first public reading of Ginsberg's 'Howl' in 1955 encapsulares rhe Beats'doubts about a society losing its vision of possibility in favour of a containment culture at homeand abroad:

We hated the war and the inhumanity and the coldness. The country had the feeling of martiallaw. An undeclared military state had leapt out of Daddy Warbucks' tanks and sprawled overthe landscape. As artists we were oppressed and indeed the people of the nation wereoppressed . .. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it aswe went inro it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision. (McClure 1982: 12-13)

By May 1957 Howl and other Poems was charged with obscenity in the law courts, provingMcClure's dark vision of a 'gray, chill, militaristic silence' (ibid.), and confirming ormanMailer's claim in 'The White egro' (1957) that 'One could hardly maintain rhe courage to beindividual, to speak with one's own voice .. .' (Mailer 1972: 271). As a resistance ro this 'slowdeath by conformity', Mailer called for 'the isolated courage of isolated people', an existentialrebellion 'to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to existwithout roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self'(ibid.). Despite Mailer's romanticizing of black oppressi»'n, his sense that the 1950s was likebeing 'jailed in the air of other people's habits . .. def6ts, boredom, quiet desperarion' mapsonto Frank's photographic quest as 'a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life'

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creating a new 'language of Hip', full of 'energy' and 'movement', with 'its emphasis . . . oncomplexity rather than simplicity', where 'each man is glimpsed as a collection of possibilities'(ibid.: 272, 281-5).

In 1947 Frank wrote to his parents that America 'is really a free country. A person can dowhat he wants' and yet simultaneously claimed 'There is only one thing you should not do, crit­icize anytning' (in Tucker and Brookman 1986: 14). Tnis douhle sense of postwar America res­onates through Frank's photography, recalling the ambiguous meanings of 'Beat' as being'beaten' as well as 'up-beat'. In fact, in 1957 Frank wrote, after nis trip to pnorograpn TheAmericans was complete, that 'criticism can come out of love. It is important co see what isinvisible to otners. Pernaps tne look of nope or tne look of sadness' (ibid.: 31). Tnis dialoguebetween hope and sadness reflects much Beat work, torn between extremes of love and hatc,yearning and loss, and it's no surprise that Frank stated 'The greatest influence on me afterleaving little Switzetland were tne Beatniks wno snowed me tnat you really ougnt to go yourown way to the end. The point is not finding answers or climbing up the ladder - this is whatshaped me' (Frank 1987: 22).

Kerouac wrote tne introduction to The Americans in 1959, made tne film PIIII My Daisywitn Frank in 1959, and took a road trip witn nim in 1958 to Florida, wnilst nis FrencnCanadian heritage and outsider Beat sensibility connected him to Frank's dislocation in the landof dreams, exploring many of tnese feelings in nis fiction. In On the Road, Sal Paradise, searcn­ing for the promise his name implies, wakes up, literally and metaphorically, to the real NewWorld as an outsider:

) was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd neverseen ... I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, thelife of a gnOSt. I was naif way across America, attne dividing line between tne East of myyoutn and tne West of my future ... (Kerouac 1985: 19-20)

Frank, 'far away from home' and 'haunted' by his journey into America was like Paradise's'stranger', a 'ghost' drifting with his camera into the secret spaces of the everyday. LaterKerouac wrote of Frank, moving like a ghost with the 'strange secrecy of a shadow', capturing'scenes that have never been seen before on film' and, like Paradise, seeing 'the dividing line[s]'of America (in Frank 1993: 5). The lines, boundaries and divisions everywhere in Frank's workdeliberately cut-up perspective and interfere with vision, as in 'Rooming House - Bunker Hill',where the eye is assaulted by angles and lines denying us even the identity of the central figure.Kerouac appreciated Frank's rnulti-Iayeredness, writing in 1958 of how he photographed 'a bigcar-trailer with pil,ed cars, two tiers, pulling in the gravel driveyard, but through the windowand rignt over a scene of leftovers and disnes wnere a family nad just vacated a bootn'. Tnismultiplicity of images, tier on tier, captured a complex vision through 'reflections everywherein chrome, glass and steel of cars, cars, road, road', in an 'art-form that was not unlike[Kerouac's] own' (in Tucker and Brookman 1986: 38):

lignts Aasning now in tne 4 a.m. rain, tne lonely look of a crossroad stoplignt, tne zing of tele­pnone wires into tne glooming distance ... And GULF, tne big sign, in tne gulf of time ... inalltne pure notdog roadstand and motel wniteness in a nameless district of USA. (ibid.: 40)

For Kerouac, Frank produced a 'sad poem' (in Frank 1993: 9), an idea endorsed by tne pnoto­grapner: 'Wnen people look at my pictures I want tnem to feeltne way tney do wnen tiley wantto read a line ofa poem twice' (in Greenilougn and Brookman 1994: 98). Tneempnasis on reread­ing and multiplicity again reinforces the dialogic structures of Frank's work as an intermediary,moving the viewer (in all senses of the phrase) between assumptions, codes of seeing and framesof reference, engaging tnem fully for 'Sometjl(ng must be left fortne onlooker. He must nave some­tiling to see. It is not all said for nim' (ibid.: 108). Similarly, Ginsberg's poetry assaulted formalassumptions and styles, claiming that 'conventional form' was 'roo symmetrical, geometrical,

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numbered and pre-fixed - unlike ro my own mind which has no beginning and end, nor fixedmeasure of thought (or speech or writing) other than its own cornerless mystery'. For him, theway forward was 'direct transcription of visual and other mental data' (in Allen and Tallman1973: 324-5).

If Frank's work is usefully compared with the sensibility of the Beats, it can also be con­trasted with Life magazine whose visual hegemony paralleled the postwar consensus:

I wanted to sell my pictures to Life magazine and they never did buy them. So I developeda tremendous contempt for them, which helped me ... I also wanted to follow my own intui~

rion and do it my own way, and not make concessions - not make a Life story. This wasanother thing I hated. Those god-damned stories with a beginning and an end ... obviouslyJ will make an effort to produce something that will stand up to all those stories but not belike them. (in Greenhough and Brookman 1994: 107)

In 1941 Life's owner Henry Luce defined 'The American Century', claiming that the nation'svalues were the world's guiding light and stating that his publication's mission was 'To see life;to see the world; to witness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of theproud; to see strange things' (in Tallack 1991: 18). Robert Frank's brief statement at the openingto his Black White and Things echoes this ironically, in its matter-of-fact starkness: 'somberpeople and black events I quiet people and peaceful places I and the things people have comein contact with'. The implied neutrality of Life's ethnographic 'see I witness I watch' is interro·gated by Frank's ambiguous, destabilized, 'moving', surrealist-tinged photography, engagingthe viewer in a dialogical, unfinished process rather than transmitting a ready·made story withpre-packaged values and assumptions of 'pictorial commoditization' (Tagg 1988: 14).

Reflecring on The Americans in 1972, Frank appreciated the radical narure of his work:

Young people and students picked up THE AMERICANS. They recognized and understoodmy language. They listened to voices that had no part in the 'System.' Aware of Hypocrisyaround them, dissatisfied with slogans from preachers and patriots, they began to questioneverything. THE AMERICANS became for many an affirmation of what they felt about theircountry ... that's what I cherish the most. (Frank 1972: n.p.)

Perhaps it is another photographic project of the times, The Family of Man (1955), curated byEdward Steichen and partly funded by Coca-Cola, whose values best encompass the spirit of thisperiod and against which one can read Frank's 'questioning' images. Steichen chose photographs,which included some by Frank, to reflect and to reinforce a postwar cultural narrative defininga global America-led 'united nations' in which politico-social tensions and differences wereunderplayed in favour of harmony, hope and regeneration. Steichen claimed that the exhibitionwas '3 mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life . .. a mirror ofthe essential oneness of mankind throughout the world' creating a new order, healing differencesand oppositions that had for so long structured the world: 'devotions/antagonisms', 'heart­aches/exaltations', 'individuaUfamily" 'human consciousness/social consciousness' (Steichen2000: 3). One exhibition caption simply read 'We shall be one person', typifying the intention tonaturalize an apparently logical order of things defined by couples, marriage, family, rituals,work, all overcoming the calamities and divisions of the modern world. Developing what he hadlearned from Walker Evans's American Photographs, Frank's sequencing and askew social com­mentary in The Americans 'answers' Steichen's exhibition with its complex and ambiguous var­iance on The Family of Man's universal themes. Frank rejects its 'rhetoric of amelioration' and'undercut[s] a unitary reading of American culture, the celebration of middle-class life, and . ..the belief that phorographs could tell a story about this assuml:d reality', opting instead for multi­plicity and uncertainty, deliberately frustrating the viewer's drge to conclude and to reconcile dif­ferences with images that are overflowing with possible meanings and jarring tensions, forcingthem outward, away from the centre and any comfortable single meanings (Sandeen 1995: 160).

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In The Americans every left-hand page is blank, with rhe image on the right, inviting theviewer to respond with their own 'script', efeacing a dialogue with the photograph and with thebook's sequence of images. [n the first photograph, 'Parade - Hoboken, New Jersey', we stareat a brick wall and a bisected American flag, noticing on either side two women, themselvesseparated, almost caged in windows and obscured by the flag or a window shade. They seem'blind', for we cannot see their eyes clearly, and their 'parade' is distanced and uncelebrated asthey wait, immobile in semi-darkness. The flag, a motif that recurs in The Americans, and tra­ditionally a symbol of national unity and purpose, divides the viewer from the women, thewomen from each other, and cuts them off from the world beyond their window. Vision is inter­rupted here borh for them as subjects and for us as viewers, and any orderliness is undone byFrank's deliberate reframing techniques whereby doorways, windows, vertical and horizontallines and shadows remind us we are looking at a photograph. In addition, Frank's use ofunusual, unsettling angles calls attention to the act of photographing, to the 'grabbed' shot, thevoyeuristic moment where divided worlds collide. Such encounters take various forms, beingantagonistic, intrusive, or, indeed, an act of communion in which differences feed some momen­tary connection between the foreign, white photographer and his subjects.

The collection's initial images of stern grey men ('City Fathers - Hoboken, New Jersey') andjubilant political workers making no eye contact ('Political Rally - Chicago') are traditionalsymbols of male, centralized power, reinforced by the draped bunting and rhe elegant, classicalpublic buildings that smack of the official and buteaucratic agencies of governmental author­ity. The viewer recalls the silent, immobile, contained women cut off from the 'parade' by theflag in the first photograph, establishing a non-linear narrative connecting motifs and threadsthroughout the collection. Power is regularly associated by Frank with white, middle-aged menwho are in the public sphere, involved in the 'parade', in stark contrast to the imprisoned,'blinded' women in their darkened rooms merely observing what others 'do'. In fact, genderand race relations emerge as central to these opening pictures, establishing a prominent set ofhierarchies in the book, as in the photograph of rhe funeral in South Carolina where blackchauffeurs wait by their cars. Here, again, the women are linked in the viewers' minds to thesesix black men on the edges of the public ritual, distracted, bored, thoughtful - waiting for theiremployers to return from the event at which they have no part to play except as workers.Frank's women and these black men begin the collection's fascination with the marginalized,often characterized as waiting or watching from the periphery, or passing through, withoutaccess to the abundant promise of postwar America. In this image, however, the third figurefrom the left looks ambiguously at Frank and the vieweG breaking the photograph's 'neutral­ity', causing us to question if this is empathy or exploitation in the 'ethnographic' moment. IsFrank a photographic tourist, like those condemned in Harrington's The Other America, tryingto present American 'slices of life', or does the returning look create a bond in which thesubject/object power relations are interfered with? Such looks return the camera's gaze andbreak apart the aura of the photographer's 'invisible eye' as it documents an anonymous event,reminding us of Frank's presence in the crowd, his selection and his intention.

Any supreme 'authority' and power is, therefore, fractured in the dialogical exchangebetween the image and audience, and within the space of the image itself. This is clear in'Savannah, Georgia', with a military man and a woman on a crosswalk and the photographerstepping in their path, literally confronting them with his camera. This uneasy image capturesboth the woman's uncertain pleasure at the street photographer's mimicking of the 'paparazzi'glamour shot and the anger of her military partner, very much a Cold War man, for whomphotography signifies intrusion, revealing secrets and 'standing in the way' of official, State­authorized action. Frank's interest in sequence and narrative is striking here, for the next photo­graph is a recruiting office with the photographer outside the door looking in, seeing part ofthe Aag and the feet of theNffcer on the desk - 'Join the Navy. Ask me about it'. The invita­tion to 'ask' is at odds with t clandestine nature of the image's dark, secretive doorframes andthe barriers between the au ience and this institutionalized, militarized world. The image itselfdoes 'ask' us, once again, to respond, to 'answer' it in some way and so enter, not the room

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itself, but a dialogue with the tensions and contradictions it reveals, epitomized by the incom­plete flag and the image's shadowy margins. Similarly, in the edgy and ambiguous '4th July, Jay,New York' the flag dominates once more, here reversed, tattered, patched and transparent, asif its symbolism both screens reality and yet still might be 'seen through' to an alternative'Independence Day' suggested by the two girls skipping underneath the flag that tecalls, ambig­uously, the last image from The Family of Man, whose children walk out of the darkness incothe light with the promise of 'A world ro be born under your footsteps.. .'

In Frank's The Americans youth, like blacks and women, are a recurrent aspect of this'waiting' culture, tapping into the emergent Beat feelings and the incipient 'teenage' revolutionof the mid-1950s. There is a group seen waiting by a jukebox, their eyes pointed to by the ornatemachine and linked uncannily to the sign on a wall behind, 'BLINDS'. Are these 'blind youth',echoing the women in 'Parade', waiting to become part of the nation, finding solace in each otheror the emergent music of the 1950s? His youthful characters are diverse, ambiguous and prob­lematic; rich kids at a drive-in, apart and distracted, black and white bikers, Puerto Rican trans­sexuals in New York. This latter image epitomizes Frank's juxtapositional use of the 'found',here the punning sign behind his subjects ('DON'T MISS MISTER MlSTIN') prefaces thecomplex cultural politics of the image, which positions Frank and his viewers behind railingslooking at the three as if they are in a zoo. The apparent dominance and control of the photog­rapher-as-ethnographer, turning subjects to objects, is undermined by the subjects' poses and bythe mimicry of the central figure, whose hand forms a mask through which he gazes upon thephotographer like the camera that looks upon him/her, thereby reversing easy notions of exploi­tation or intrusion. As always, Frank is aware of the multiple, surreal possibilities of the photo­graphic image, here related to the act of spectacle and to self-performance, as the subjects'control' the image and 'use' the moment for their own purposes, adopting and subverting'normal' glamour photography or documentary traditions as modes through which to articulatetheir own creative priorities. Replacing the uncomplicated ethnographic document Frank createsa dialogic encounter, shifting power between the object-subject and the photographer-viewer ina series of exchanges about race, gender, power and the politics of 'looking' itself that do notcancel out the subjects' authority. In the gaze between lens and eyes, Frank challenges dominantpower relations and visual traditions in similar ways to that of his Abstract Expressionist andBeat friends.

Like Ginsberg's 'shorthand notations of visual imagery, juxtapositions of hydrogen juke-box- abstract haikus', Frank's spatial images juggle language, form and idea within a 'field' acrosswhich emotion, imagination and thought could play (in Allen and Tallman 1973: 319). In thisFrank shares much with Charles Olson's concept of 'composition by field', opposing 'closedverse' with a new formal experimentation based on high energy 'projective' or 'open verse',valuing 'kinetics', 'principle' (form as an extension of coment) and 'process'. The improvisedmobility of Frank's street photography has much in common with Olson: 'get on with it, keepmoving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split secondacts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen' (Olson 1966: 17). Olsoninsists that 'the conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open' in thecomplex 'space-tensions of a poem' (ibid.: 21), so that what results, as in Frank's photography,is challenging, unsettling and always relational.

Consider the photograph 'Ranch Market, Hollywood', whose dialogic 'field of vision'creates Olson's tensions and relations by juxtaposing within the frame a working woman's facefrozen with boredom, almost half ~sleep, staring beyond the frame, surrounded by the sleek,shiny surfaces of her workplace. In contrast, the world that she 'serves' signifies American com­modity fetishism overseen by the smiling face of Santa Claus inviting the customer to buy more.The visual 'script' emphasizes commodification, size, value and excess: 'Jumbo size', 'extra','Bigger and Better than Ever', whereas she seems detached from this cycle of economic 'value'and hearty consumption. As a woman and a worker, her <v~.'ue' is defined as economic andtherefore part of the market in which she is pictured, and her 'pnly defence is her stoicism andher gaze outside and beyond the reflective surfaces of her gaudy workplace.

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Cold War 'Containment Culture' and Photography

In 'Barber shop through screen door - McClellanville, South Carolina' Frank creates asurreal space of simultaneity where elements intersect in patterns of dialogue: the inside andoutside, human and non-human, detail and uncertainty, the seer and seen, light and dark, workand representation, voyeurism and documentary, transparency and opacity, reality and abstrac­tion, absence and presence. As we try to 'read' this photograph Frank denies us the security ofconvention by denying us the clean edges of separation and distance that characterize 'reality'as categorizable differences - 'this' and 'not this' - and recognizable codes. Instead, things blurand connect as the reflection of Frank and his camera reframes the photograph from within,turning the act of representation back on itself so that 'front' and 'back', subject and object loserheir anchorage as fixed vectors in our assessment of what is real, offering a productive ambi­guity of multiple frames and screens that serve to 'recode' the image. The eight (at least)windows in the photograph mirror the lens, reminding us that despite its fixed position (in thecamera, in the hands of Frank, in McClellanville, South Carolina) what this image creates is an'unfixing' through which the representation of the everyday invites us to dwell on (and in) thepossibilities and problematics of photography.

The dialogic nature of this image carries over into the next photograph 'Backyard - VeniceWest, California', whose equally specific title implies precision, clarity and exactitude, almostlike an exercise in mapping. However, the titles mislead the viewer, for what is presented is theantithesis of conventional order. In 'Backyard' Frank achieves a similar effect to the first imagebut without employing its reflections and complex intersections. Instead, he frames a yardwhose patterns, shapes and tensions provide a field of vision that befuddles the eye, causing theviewer to question the 'real' again. The image's 'voices' are full of contradictions and quirkyjuxtapositions, like the central figure sheltered by the flag, apparently at peace amid the yard'sseeming chaos. It is a productive 'chaos' symbolizing the possibilities of the nation the flag rep­resents, a hybrid mixture of rusting cars and fecund vegetation, of tract-home regimentationand proto-environmental recycling. Frank's deliberate confusion draws us into the dynamicrelations of the image once more, noticing in the details of the backyard a hidden history, easilyoverlooked in the search for the grand narrative. But as always in Frank's work, the micro­narratives matter - the 'backyards' and 'barbershops' tell an alternative history, or surreal eth­nography, of America, like that in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952): 'Ask your wife to takeyou around to the gin mills and the barber shops and the juke joints and the churches, Brother.Yes, and the beauty parlours on Saturdays when they're frying hair. A whole unrecorded historyis spoken then' (Ellison 1965: 379). This 'unrecorded history' tells ground-level stories ofAmerican people and places, a surreal ethnography which although often messy, muddled andunfinished, holds within the 'waiting' a sense of promise embedded in stoic resistance and thewill to continue. The supposed 'order' of established lives and regimented expectations aboutwhat constitutes 'normality' are refigured in this surreal image, as so often in Frank's phoro­graphs, for this man at ease, smoking in his backyard, with his feet up amongst the debris, is aman who has found some equilibrium between order and chaos, stasis and mobility, conven­tion and eccentricity, and he occupies a hybrid space, neither one thing nor the other, but ofboth - a dialogical 'other' space that weaves out of the fragments a contradictory, jagged'history' in resistance to any assumed and 'natural' way of being. For all its implied criticism ofthe 1950s, Frank sees within America a diverse and divided nation of freedom and restriction,youth and age, poverty and plenty, a living mix of voices that play across the photographs likeshadows and light, a dialogical pattern of immense, provocative and persistent ambiguity.

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